Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Just exactly how many islands are in the Hawaiian Islands? Eight,
right? (Don’t forget Kahoolawe and Niihau.). One answer is on our State flag.
Eight wide, horizontal stripes in red, white, and blue (but not in that order
oddly enough), are proudly on display waving everywhere you go. Those eight
stripes represent our eight islands in Hawaii. Too bad it’s not right. There’s
more to Hawaii from Niihau to the Big Island.

With strange-sounding names like Pearl and Hermes, Lisianski,
and the French Frigate Shoals, the rest of the Hawaiian Islands are an isolated
and lengthy chain of atolls, seamounts, and specs of land that are dwarfed by
the eight main islands. The Northwestern or Leeward Islands are older, uninhabited,
and very mysterious.

The biggest of these islands are also the closest. One-hundred-and-sixty-six
miles to the northwest of Kauai you’ll find a windswept and lonely rock jutting
out of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a dramatic setting. Although it’s only one
square mile, Nihoa Island has sea cliffs rising 900 feet into the air. It looks
like something you’d see off the coast of Scotland instead of the central
Pacific.

Beyond that lies Mokumanamana, a rocky crescent rising only a
few hundred feet above sea level. When Captain La Perouse made his way through
Hawaii, he christened the island after the Jacques Necker, a finance minister
in France. Since then its Hawaiian name has been restored.

Native Hawaiians knew these islands were out there. Chants and
other stories passed down through generations have referred to these places.
Folktales indicate that this was the final settlement of the menehune. But by
the time the islands had been settled and came into contact with Europeans, no
one was living there. They were uninhabited by the time the first Europeans
arrived there in 1789.

This isn’t the only place where that’s happened in the
Pacific. Archaeologists have found small, marginal islands that once were
inhabited but were later abandoned. The Cook Islands have Palmerston and
Suwarrow. The Phoenix Islands have Howland. And we have Nihoa and Necker.

In the days of the Hawaiian Kingdom, these two islands were
reclaimed by the crown. Queen Kaahumanu visited Nihoa in 1822 and declared that
it was part of the Hawaiian Islands. During the reign of Kamehameha IV, the
king sent a captain to claim Mokumanamana in 1857—which sparked some
controversy with France that remained unsettled until 1894, when it was firmly
part of the Hawaiian government.

So who were these people living out at the far, far end of the
Hawaiian Islands? Nobody really knows. It wasn’t until the 1920s when the
Bishop Museum sent out a band of archaeologists. Both islands were full of
relatively undisturbed sites, encampments, and temples. They estimated that
Nihoa could hold about 100 people there, but resources like fresh water must
have been really limited.

But it was the artifacts that they brought back with them that
make the place so strange. The icons on Nihoa and Necker look nothing like the
images found in the rest of the islands. Stone carvings depict round, neckless
heads that show traces of a faint smile.

Did the Bishop Museum archaeologists find a lost tribe? Who
were these people? The prevailing theory takes us back to the golden age of
Polynesian voyaging. For decades now, archaeologists and anthropologists have
hypothesized that Hawaii was settled by two distinct waves of migrants from the
South Seas.

The first wave came around 500 to 750 A.D. and they were from
the Marquesas Islands. Centuries later, voyagers from Tahiti arrived. For
centuries it was believed that the islanders made frequent trips across the
long distances from Hawaii and the Society Islands. Then around 1300 it
stopped. Hawaii remained in isolation and developed its own culture and heritage
until European contact.

So where does Nihoa and Necker fit in? For the archaeologists
in the 1920s, it was believed that the islanders out there were an outpost and
remnant from the first wave of migrants. This nicely fits into the menehune
theory.

But that may be changing. Recently, Dr. Kekuewa Kikiloi has
posited a different view. That the islanders out there were very much part of
the rest of Hawaiian society. They traveled frequently to Kauai and the main
islands as a means for survival.

He compared it to the way we live now. In an interview, Dr.
Kikiloi said that it was not unlike our dependency of Matson shipping to and
from the mainland for our own survival.

Will we ever know what life was like for these islanders?
Probably not. Much of their traditions and stories have been lost to time. They
mystery islands will continue to hold their secrets.